Watts Per

In a moment of consumer lust I bought a fabulous speaker system for my MP3 player yesterday. The manager of Dixons (sadly I couldn’t wait patiently and buy online) furnished me with item after item to plug my Creative into and test for loudness and greatness and eventually I plumped for the doughnut shaped beauty, a JBL OnStage, that is pictured above. It is only a tiny thing really but, by heck, it makes a wonderful noise. I love it very much.

This summer I have started working part-time (and on a voluntary basis) for Oxfam in Gloucester mainly because it keeps me busy but also because they posted an advert in their window asking for people to help redo their book department. They have a large warehouse of books ‘out the back’ and today I ruthlessly set about ‘culling’ (Oxfam’s word) the shelves of older stock and replacing it with higher quality and more sellable stuff. It was marvellous fun and the time flew by. At the end of my stint, the shelves were packed with lots of my favourite writers (Ian McEwan, John O’Farrell, Malcolm Bradbury) where earlier the likes of Maeve Binchy and Catherine Cookson had nestled dully. The staff were friendly and quite a mix. This afternoon a fallow seventeen year old lad in the warehouse tried to get me into Motley Crue and Green Day by playing me their hits loudly. Rather condescendingly I explained that ‘I was there’ for the original punk rock but must admit to surreptitiously tapping my toe to ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ by Tommy Lee and company as I priced up my next batch of modern literature.